The body totalled up, and the consort finally named

Aruṇa is the red of the sky immediately before sunrise, distinguished in Sanskrit from rakta and lohita, which are simply red, and from the words for crimson and scarlet. It is also a proper name: Aruṇa is the dawn personified, the charioteer of the sun, hatched prematurely from Vinatā's egg and so incomplete in body, elder brother of Garuḍa. The colour saturates Śrīvidyā's iconography. Her body is red, her garment is red, the unguent smeared on her is red, the flowers offered to her are red, the throne is red; the meditation verses prefixed to this very hymn open by calling her aruṇā before saying anything else. The usual explanation refers the colour to rajas, the guṇa of activity and passion, since she is the aspect of the absolute that acts rather than the one that rests; commentators frequently hear karuṇā, compassion, behind aruṇā as well. The name insists on uniformity: not red ornaments on a fair body, but red without interruption, which is a way of saying that nothing about her is neutral or inert.

Anavadyāṅgī rewards being taken apart. Avadya is a gerundive of the root vad, to speak, with a negative prefix — literally "not to be spoken of," hence disgraceful, the sort of thing one does not mention. Anavadya negates that again, so the word means blameless by a double negative, with a faint sense of "there is nothing here one would need to be tactful about." It is an old word, at home in Vedic, and a stock epithet in court poetry. Its work here is structural: after all the individual limbs have been described, one name certifies the whole. Sarvābharaṇabhūṣitā continues that certification into the jewellery. Ābharaṇa comes from a root meaning to carry or bring, so an ornament is literally something brought and put on, and the offering of ābharaṇa is one of the standard services in the sixteenfold liturgy — the name describes something the worshipper does rather than only something to picture. Commentators regularly turn it around: it is not that the ornaments adorn her, but that anything she wears becomes an ornament.

With the fourth name the hymn introduces her consort under the title Śrīvidyā always uses for him. Kāmeśvara means lord of desire, and the title carries a story. When the gods needed Śiva roused from his meditation so that a son could be born to destroy the demon Tāraka, they sent Kāma, the god of desire, to shoot him; Śiva opened his third eye and burnt Kāma to ash on the spot, and at the pleading of Kāma's wife Rati restored him without a body, whence his name Ananga, the limbless one. In this tradition Śiva does not merely defeat desire and leave it destroyed; he becomes its sovereign, and Lalitā is Kāmeśvarī, the feminine of the same word. The two occupy the bindu, the central point of the Śrīcakra, and the school's position on pleasure follows from that arrangement: desire is not to be extinguished but ruled, and rule of it is what divinity looks like. Aṅka, the word for lap, means the hollow of the side where a child is carried, and the iconography is literal — she sits on his left thigh. The couch on which the two of them sit will be described much later in the hymn, when its four legs turn out to be four of the great gods.

Śivā is the feminine of śiva, and the history of that adjective is worth knowing. Śiva means auspicious, kindly, benign, and in the Vedic hymns it is applied to the fierce god Rudra as a propitiating euphemism long before it hardens into his proper name; the word never entirely sheds that ambiguity. To give the goddess the bare feminine of the god's name is the strongest identity claim in the verse, and the tradition presses it. The commonplace in tantric literature is that śiva without śakti is śava, a corpse — a pun that turns on a single vowel and that the Saundaryalaharī opens by asserting in more decorous language.

Svādhīnavallabhā, the last of the six, is a technical term borrowed from poetics. The handbooks of literary theory classify heroines into eight types according to their situation with respect to the beloved, and the first and happiest is the svādhīnabhartṛkā, the woman whose husband is entirely under her sway and has no wish to be elsewhere. Applying the category to the goddess does two things at once. On the surface it completes the domestic picture. Beneath it, it states the doctrine the whole system rests on, that the inert absolute has no capacity to act except through its own power, so that dependence runs from him to her and not the reverse.

The first line contains a piece of orthography that puzzles nearly every beginner. Sarvāruṇā ends in long ā and anavadyāṅgī begins in short a; when a long ā meets a short a, the short vowel disappears entirely, and Devanāgarī records its disappearance with the mark ऽ, the avagraha. It is not a letter and it is not pronounced. What you say is sarvāruṇānavadyāṅgī, one continuous stream, and what the mark tells you is that a vowel was there and has gone. This matters for the nāmāvalī, where the two names come apart again and are recited separately as sarvāruṇāyai namaḥ and anavadyāṅgyai namaḥ.

That second dative is the trap of the verse. Every other name here is a feminine ā-stem taking -āyai, but anavadyāṅgī is an ī-stem, and ī-stems form the dative in -yai: anavadyāṅgyai, not the anavadyāṅgyāyai that reciters reaching for the familiar ending tend to produce.

The verse gives good practice on the guttural nasal ṅ, which occurs twice and in both possible environments — before g in anavadyāṅgī and before k in śivakāmeśvarāṅkasthā. It is the sound at the end of English "sing"; the difficulty is only that Sanskrit puts it inside words where English speakers substitute n. Say aṅgī and aṅka with the tongue tip nowhere near the teeth.

All three Sanskrit sibilants appear here and should be kept apart. Dental s opens sarva and svādhīna, and is the ordinary English s with the tongue at the teeth; palatal ś opens śiva and the śva of kāmeśvara, close to English sh but with the tongue flat against the hard palate; retroflex ṣ appears in bhūṣitā, made with the tongue tip curled back. Running sarvābharaṇabhūṣitā slowly is a compact drill for the first and the third.

Two clusters need care. Sthā in āṅkasthā is dental s followed by aspirated dental th — one puff of breath after the t, not a separate h. Svā at the head of svādhīnavallabhā is s followed by v, both fully articulated, with no vowel slipped between them. Vallabhā has a doubled l, and the doubling is real: hold the l noticeably longer than a single one, as in the join of English "tall lady".

The second line is rhythmically unlike anything nearby: three names of nine, two and six syllables, with the two-syllable śivā between the long ones and easy to swallow. Give it its own space. It is the hymn's shortest utterance set two verses from its longest, and hearing that contrast is part of hearing the verse.

As for what the verse asks: it is the place where the practitioner stops looking at her and notices that someone else has been in the frame the whole time. Everything before this has been a solitary figure being described from the hair downward. From here the object of contemplation is a pair, and the relation between the two is the subject of most of what the hymn goes on to say. Readers who are counting will also notice that this is the fifty-fourth name — half of one hundred and eight, and the point at which the description of her person is finished and the description of her world begins.